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Steam-Driven Dreams

Steam is cool. Or rather, hot: the technology that helped usher in the Industrial Revolution shows up these days in neo-nostalgic steampunk fiction, design and fashion. It’s not just affection for leather and brass that drives the fascination; harnessing the power of steam broke humans out of what William Rosen calls the “Malthusian trap” that had kept mankind ever on the brink of famine and collapse. His book, “The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention,” is a sneaky history — ostensibly about the origins of the steam engine, though actually about much more.

The obvious audience for Rosen’s book consists of those who hunger to know what it took to go from Heron of Alexandria’s toy engine, created in the first century A.D., to practical and brawny beasts like George and Robert Stephenson’s Rocket, which kicked off the age of steam locomotion in 1829. But Rosen is aiming for more than a fan club of steam geeks. The “most powerful idea” of his title is not an early locomotive: “The Industrial Revolution was, first and foremost, a revolution in invention,” he writes, “a radical transformation in the process of invention itself.” The road to Rocket was built with hundreds of innovations large and small that helped drain the mines, run the mills, and move coal and then people over rails.

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“The Most Powerful Idea in the World” is not a particularly new interpretation of the Industrial Revolution, but Rosen does take the reader down every possible avenue. You know the old line about the man who, when asked for the time, tells you how a watch is made? Rosen describes quality control in the manufacture of precisely machined screws, the varieties of molecular configurations that form under different techniques for making iron, and the delicate interplay of heddles and shuttles in the technology of weaving. Still, as someone who spun an eclectic history from small things in his previous book, “Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe,” Rosen is a natural and playful story­teller, and his digressions both inform the narrative and lend it an eccentric and engaging rhythm.

Underlying it all, Rosen argues, was the recognition that ideas themselves have economic value, which is to say, this book isn’t just gearhead wonkery, it’s legal wonkery too. Abraham Lincoln, wondering why Heron’s steam engine languished, claimed that the patent system “added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius.” Rosen agrees, offering a forceful argument in the debate, which has gone on for centuries, over whether patents promote innovation or retard it.

Those who believe passionately, as Thomas Jefferson did, that inventions “cannot, in nature, be a subject of property,” are unlikely to be convinced. Those who agree with the inventors James Watt and Richard Arkwright, who wrote in a manuscript that “an engineer’s life without patent is not worthwhile,” will cheer. Either way, Rosen’s presentation of this highly intellectual debate will reward even those readers who never wondered how the up-and-down chugging of a piston is converted into consistent rotary motion.

In an epilogue Rosen gets around to the global downside of the Industrial Revolution: the trouble that all this burning coal has gotten us into with greenhouse gases and climate change. But, he writes, the answer to our modern technology woes is not to turn back the clock. His discussion of the Luddites shows the folly of that. We need more technology, not less, he insists. “There may be no way to put the genie of sustained invention back in the bottle,” he writes, “but we can put the genie to work.”

THE MOST POWERFUL IDEA IN THE WORLD

A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention

By William Rosen

Illustrated. 370 pp. Random House. $28

John Schwartz is The Times’s national legal correspondent.

A version of this review appears in print on August 29, 2010, on Page BR20 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Steam-Driven Dreams. Today's Paper|Subscribe